Update: According to a Twitter update, Felicia Day (star of The Guild) did the voice of Zojja the Asuran in the trailer. Lots of speculation on the game can be found at massively.com.
December 4, 2009
More good news on reining in the out-of-control HRC bureaucracy
Colby Cosh summarizes the results of the Alberta Queen’s Bench decision on the Boisson case:
So how stands freedom of the press in Alberta after Thursday’s Queen’s Bench decision tossing out the Boissoin human-rights panel ruling? Justice E.C. Wilson’s reasons establish two big things, pending some higher-level judicial review of Alberta’s human-rights regime:
1. The Charter of Rights can’t be used willy-nilly by content creators in magazines and newspapers as a shield against tribunal oversight, but
2. The tribunals have to confine themselves strictly to the powers granted them by statute, defer to Charter values, respect the presumption of innocence, and in general act a lot less like a cross between a military junta and a three-ring circus.
In 2002 Red Deer preacher Stephen Boisson had written a sweaty, sulfurous letter about the Great Gay Conspiracy to the local daily paper (pause for ironic smirk: it’s called the Advocate). Among other things, Boisson denounced the spectacle of “men kissing men”, which suggests he may not know his way around the synoptic Gospels too well. In any event, a panel of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission found him guilty of discrimination-by-the-word, and he was subjected to a fine, prior restraint on his future speech, and a demand for a written apology.
Comments Off on More good news on reining in the out-of-control HRC bureaucracy
Britain lowers defences against alien invasion
It’s true . . . the British are now wide-open to invaders from Rigel: they’ve re-assigned their UFO investigation forces to other duties:
The Ministry of Defence has closed its UFO unit after more than 50 years of investigating reported UK sightings.
A hotline and e-mail address for the public to report possible sightings was shut on 1 December because it had no “defence value”, the MoD said.
The officer handling reports has moved to another post, saving £44,000 a year.
The MoD said the unit had received thousands of reports, although none had yielded proof of aliens or any security threat to the UK.
Well of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? Expect the mothership to show up any day now . . .
Comments Off on Britain lowers defences against alien invasion
Debunking the porn-violence link
After giving up all hope of finding “uncontaminated” study subjects, a Quebec researcher concludes that the long standing claim that viewing pornography leads to violence and sexual crimes doesn’t appear to be true:
Lajeunesse, unable to find any smut-free young chaps, carried out a detailed study on 20 students who admitted having a fondness for filth. It seems that 90 per cent of all porn is viewed on the internet nowadays, at least in French Canada. Unsurprisingly single chaps watch spend about four times as much time looking at porn as those in committed relationships.
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional,” reports Lajeunesse.
“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship … Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy … men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he adds.
The study was funded by Canada’s Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Violence Familiale et la Violence Faite aux Femmes (CRI-VIFF, or the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women). However Lajeunesse firmly rejected the idea that goggling over naughty pics, vids etc leads men to mistreat the ladies they encounter in real life.
Amusingly, while putting this post up, my iTunes playlist offered up Rough Trade’s “Crimes of Passion”.
Comments Off on Debunking the porn-violence link
PayPal detects phishing attempt . . . from PayPal
You know those bogus emails you get pretending to be from PayPal, including poisoned links? If you’re the conscientious type, you forward them on to the anti-phishing folks at PayPal, right? You’ll usually get a response saying something like You’re right, it does look suspicious:
Banks and financial institutions are fond of lecturing customers about the perils of phishing emails, the bogus messages that attempt to trick marks into handing over their login credentials to fraudulent sites. Yet many undo this good work by sending out emails themselves that invite users to click on a link and log into their account rather than going a safer route and telling users to use bookmarked versions of their site.
The problems of the former approach are neatly illustrated by a blog posting by Randy Abrams, a former Microsoft staffer who is now director of technical education at anti-virus firm Eset. Abrams complained about the inclusion of a link in an email from PayPal as it looked rather too much like a phishing email.
I’ve noticed a number of rather more sophisticated phishing attempts in the last couple of weeks, which makes this PayPal error all the more dangerous . . . because it lowers peoples’ wariness about other legitimate-seeming messages.
Comments Off on PayPal detects phishing attempt . . . from PayPal
Don’t bother your pretty little heads about all this “science” stuff
The non-scientists among us (that’s you and you and you and . . .) should just take a pill, sit back, and stop trying to understand the science:
And history repeats itself with climate change. We tell you people of the imminent dangers from the earth warming, and what do you do? You mock us. You question our motives. People who can’t even convert Fahrenheit to Celsius try and tell us we did the science wrong. Now emails have leaked from the Climate Research Unit that apparently show that scientists were fixing the data and trying to suppress the scientific research of dissenters, and you people demand answers from us. I have one thing to say to that. How dare you!
You do not understand the first thing about climate research. Man-made global warming is settled science. Disaster is imminent. We know this. It is a fact. We don’t waste time on studies that say otherwise, the same way we don’t waste time on studies that assert that the earth is flat. We are very smart people, and when we say something is so, you should just accept it.
So you think what is in those emails is important? Well, what exactly do you know? Do you see the white lab coats we wear? That color symbolizes pure science. Were someone like you to wear one, within five minutes it would be stained with neon orange powdered cheese and wet with drool from you trying to comprehend the data sets people like me look at every day.
Comments Off on Don’t bother your pretty little heads about all this “science” stuff
